be as sweet as pie. After meeting him just two or three times, one might take him as merely a strict company man who was working his way up the ladder of a big corporation, but he was much more than that: He was one of a handful of men who had succeeded to the very top, and in reality was as tooth-achingly ambitious as a mouthful of saccharine. As the head of MovieTime, there were only one or two spots above him, and he meant to succeed there, sooner as opposed to later. His goal was to run all of Splatch Verner.
MovieTime was a division of Splatch Verner, a media conglomerate that considered itself bigger and more important than any government and whose business practices were completely American. In other words, on the surface “the company” 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 56
56
c a n d a c e b u s h n e l l
appeared to take care of its employees, providing them with benefits and stock options; it was politically correct, spouting its commitment to multiculturalism and a guarantee against sexual harassment (information circulated through regular e-mails); but below the surface it was business as usual, run by men who tacitly agreed that their work was the closest thing to going to war without going to war. In the past fifteen years, Splatch Verner had bought up magazine and movie companies, cable stations, publishing houses, Internet servers, telephone and satellite providers, and advertising agencies. The company made entertainment and marketed it and distributed it; it was into branding, and as long as the public bought its product and bought it en masse, no one need question its true motives, which were to make money at all costs. The men who succeeded up the ladder at Splatch Verner understood it was “company policy” to squash anyone who opposed them like a bug; the individual had no chance against them, there would never be a David and Goliath story, and the higher-ups sometimes joked that anyone who threatened them would
“never eat lunch in this world again.”
Selden Rose, being the exemplar Splatch Verner man, was decorative in neither clothes nor manner; the one area in which he meant to express himself was in his choice of his second wife.
Many of his counterparts, who were heads of other divisions and, like him, in their mid-forties, had recently taken second wives, trading in their first wives (who were mostly attractive, a year or two younger, and serious, like Selden’s first wife, who was a lawyer) for more exciting women who were ten or fifteen years younger.
The head of advertising had married a prima ballerina with the American Ballet Theatre, a small, dark-haired girl who was wide-eyed and mysteriously mute; the head of cable was married to a White Russian pianist who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Romanovs. Other second wives included a Chinese Internet genius who had attended Harvard, a Republican political pundit with her own show on CNN, and a fashion designer. Janey Wilcox would not only add to this list, she would surpass it, making him the envy of the company. He was already beginning to label her in his mind “model . . . and international beauty.” Selden Rose parked his car on the grass and got out, adjusting his prescription Ray-Ban sunglasses. Normally he would have put the top on and locked up the car, but he was feeling unusually cavalier. He’d been quite happy to discover at dinner on Friday night that Janey Wilcox was not as stupid as he’d feared she might be—or as stupid as people told him she was—and underneath what he categorized as her
“bitter” exterior, he thought he saw depths of kindness. Like many men who lack real experience, and therefore understanding, of women, he found it impossible to imagine that a beautiful woman could actually be a bitch, nor could he accept the idea that she might not like him. Instead, he ascribed Janey’s sharp remarks to an 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 57
t r a d i n g u p
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understandably
MovieTime was a division of Splatch Verner, a media conglomerate that considered itself bigger and more important than any government and whose business practices were completely American. In other words, on the surface “the company” 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 56
56
c a n d a c e b u s h n e l l
appeared to take care of its employees, providing them with benefits and stock options; it was politically correct, spouting its commitment to multiculturalism and a guarantee against sexual harassment (information circulated through regular e-mails); but below the surface it was business as usual, run by men who tacitly agreed that their work was the closest thing to going to war without going to war. In the past fifteen years, Splatch Verner had bought up magazine and movie companies, cable stations, publishing houses, Internet servers, telephone and satellite providers, and advertising agencies. The company made entertainment and marketed it and distributed it; it was into branding, and as long as the public bought its product and bought it en masse, no one need question its true motives, which were to make money at all costs. The men who succeeded up the ladder at Splatch Verner understood it was “company policy” to squash anyone who opposed them like a bug; the individual had no chance against them, there would never be a David and Goliath story, and the higher-ups sometimes joked that anyone who threatened them would
“never eat lunch in this world again.”
Selden Rose, being the exemplar Splatch Verner man, was decorative in neither clothes nor manner; the one area in which he meant to express himself was in his choice of his second wife.
Many of his counterparts, who were heads of other divisions and, like him, in their mid-forties, had recently taken second wives, trading in their first wives (who were mostly attractive, a year or two younger, and serious, like Selden’s first wife, who was a lawyer) for more exciting women who were ten or fifteen years younger.
The head of advertising had married a prima ballerina with the American Ballet Theatre, a small, dark-haired girl who was wide-eyed and mysteriously mute; the head of cable was married to a White Russian pianist who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Romanovs. Other second wives included a Chinese Internet genius who had attended Harvard, a Republican political pundit with her own show on CNN, and a fashion designer. Janey Wilcox would not only add to this list, she would surpass it, making him the envy of the company. He was already beginning to label her in his mind “model . . . and international beauty.” Selden Rose parked his car on the grass and got out, adjusting his prescription Ray-Ban sunglasses. Normally he would have put the top on and locked up the car, but he was feeling unusually cavalier. He’d been quite happy to discover at dinner on Friday night that Janey Wilcox was not as stupid as he’d feared she might be—or as stupid as people told him she was—and underneath what he categorized as her
“bitter” exterior, he thought he saw depths of kindness. Like many men who lack real experience, and therefore understanding, of women, he found it impossible to imagine that a beautiful woman could actually be a bitch, nor could he accept the idea that she might not like him. Instead, he ascribed Janey’s sharp remarks to an 18947_ch01.qxd 4/14/03 11:22 PM Page 57
t r a d i n g u p
57
understandably
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